Re: [PATCH v1 net-next] net: dsa: qca: ar9331: add ethtool stats support

[Jakub Kicinski]

On Tue, 17 Nov 2020 01:27:31 +0200 Vladimir Oltean wrote:
> > Note that I said _forwarded_. Frames are either forwarded by the HW or
> > SW (former never hit the CPU, while the latter do hit the CPU or
> > originate from it).  
> 
> Ah, you were just thinking out loud, I really did not understand what
> you meant by the separation between "forwarded in software" and
> "forwarded in hardware".
> Yes, the hardware typically only gives us MAC-level counters anyway.
> Another way to look at it is that the number of packets forwarded in
> hardware from a given port are equal to the total number of RX packets
> on that MAC minus the packets seen by the CPU coming from that port.
> So all in all, it's the MAC-level counters we should expose in
> .ndo_get_stats64, I'm glad you agree. As for the error packets, I
> suppose that would be a driver-specific aggregate.

Yup, sorry about the confusion, I was only working on those stats
with SDN/OvS/tc hardware, which explains the slight difference in
terminology.